Closure
by 19x19
Summary: AU. After Sai disappeared, Shindou gave up playing go, and never changed his mind. More than 25 years later, Touya Akira is at the top of the go world.
1. Fuseki

Imagine an AU in which, for whatever reason, Shindou stopped playing go when Sai disappeared and didn't start again. This story takes place in such a continuity, many years later. Shindou hasn't been heard from in years. Touya Akira is a very successful go pro.

No sex. A small amount of profanity.

This will not be a happy story.

* * *

'This has to be the worst neighborhood in Tokyo,' Touya thought, 'and I just had to go and get lost in it.'

He hadn't imagined that there would be any problem. The reception was in a big, new hotel. One that Touya hadn't been to before, but he'd been told at the go association that there was a direct entrance from the subway station into the hotel. What he hadn't been told was how enormous the station was, even for the Tokyo subway. Three lines crossed there, and there were innumerable staircases, ramps and passageways. No doubt there had been signs directing him to the hotel but, his senses overwhelmed with signs directing him to this or to that, he had missed them and abruptly found himself out of the station and on an unfamiliar street in a decidedly bad neighborhood. This was not the Tokyo Touya knew. There was no sign of the hotel.

The evening was cold, damp and raw. Garbage swirled around in the gutters, kicked here and there by gusts of the February wind, which easily cut through Touya's expensive but thin topcoat. He pulled his hat down as best he could, stood on a corner and looked around for a trace of the hotel. The thing was huge, and must be quite close by. There ought to have been some sort of sign, a gigantic one by rights. But all he could see were garish neon signs beckoning him towards dive bars, cheap restaurants and no doubt disreputable hotels.

"Lost?" The mocking voice was raspy and harsh. Touya glanced at the speaker and immediately looked away. The old man looked like a derelict, and sounded a bit unbalanced. _If you meet his eyes, he'll be able to tell that you're afraid. _To calm himself Touya imagined that the man might be someone's grandfather. It didn't work. The idea instantly conjured up a pack of switchblade-wielding grandchildren crouching in the shadows, waiting for the signal to strike.

"I bet you're after that fancy new hotel. The Particle, The Pinnacle, The Pedestal, the Pederast, whatever they decided to call it. Urban fucking renewal. You know I used to live in one of the buildings they knocked down to build that craphole?"

"Well, I'm sorry about that," Touya said, still keeping his gaze down and trying to avoid eye contact. The man's trousers needed cleaning, or better yet a toxic waste disposal squad. But Touya was becoming less judgmental with every second spent in this place. "Please, the Pinnacle Hotel…can you tell me how to get there from here?"

"Yeah, yeah. If they hadn't spent so much money on granite and glass for the front they coulda afforded to put a sign on their side door. It's right over there."

Touya peered down the dirty alley the stranger gestured at. At the end was the gleaming black wall of a new modern building, with a small, discreet entrance not graced by anything in the way of signage.

"Or maybe they made it all understated 'cause they were scared that some of us from the neighborhood might try and go in there if we knew what it was", the stranger rasped at him. "As if we don't know. You go ahead. They won't throw _you_ out."

"Thank you very much." Touya thought that he should give the scary old man some sort of a tip, but delighted though he was at the prospect of escaping this alarming situation, the idea of reaching for his wallet in such surroundings made him nervous. The man seemed to understand the situation precisely, and waved him off.

"Don't trouble yourself, Honinbou."

Relieved, Touya almost ran to the lighted doorway. No switchblade-wielding grandchildren pursued, and his kidneys remained unpunctured. The door led to an unmarked but clean and lushly carpeted passage. He soon found himself in a hotel lobby, where a placard announcing the go reception pointed him to the proper floor and room. Only once he was safely on an escalator gliding up to level M2 was his heart rate back to normal and his brain relaxed enough to start working properly again. Only then did it dawn on him.

The filthy old derelict had called him '_Honinbou'_.

* * *

February turned into March, and the weather turned from ghastly to merely changeable. The go calendar remained reassuringly predictable, with its schedule of matches, events, and promotions. Touya continued his own personal routine, which rarely varied. Mostly he studied. What most people didn't understand was that studying was how he spent the bulk of his time. Matches were a diversion from his real work, in a way. Matches were a chance to put to the test what he'd learned in study, but the studying, the learning was the point of it all.

One thing kept intruding on Touya's otherwise disciplined thoughts: the man outside the hotel who had recognized him. That was just so weird. In the go world Touya was almost as famous as his late father had been a generation ago. He wasn't an especially charismatic personality, like Yashiro, nor did he dress in a way that made him stand out, like Ogata-san. He wasn't as good looking as Isumi. So despite his success he didn't actually have very many fans. But he did have four titles now, and some people were starting to say that eventually he'd have five as his father had had, possibly even six. Still, even that considerable success didn't make Touya Akira a household name outside the go world. Of course most amateur go players knew his name, and many would know his face as well, especially if they subscribed to Weekly Go. But the go world was small. Touya was recognized on the street from time to time, but this wasn't a common occurrence. All the more unexpected, then, for him to be recognized by anyone in that particular place on that particular night. The street had been dark, and Touya had been pretty well bundled up against the cold. Even an acquaintance might well have passed by him without noticing who he was, which made it highly unlikely for a person like the old man to know who Touya Akira was. Even more unlikely for him to know what Touya looked like, let alone to recognize him under such conditions. But that wasn't the most unlikely thing.

The man had called him "_Honinbou_". The accepted practice was to address a holder of multiple titles by the most prestigious one he held, and Touya was already the Kisei title holder when he became the Honinbou. There had been a brief period when people called him Honinbou by way of congratulating him on his new title. They then went back to calling him Kisei, which was as it should be. So why had the old man, who by rights shouldn't have known who he was at all, called him Honinbou, which nobody ever called him? He should have laughed off this minor mystery by now: told an amusing version of the story to Ashiwara or Ogata and then forgotten all about it. But for some reason he hadn't told anyone, and he couldn't forget.

* * *

The answer to Touya's predicament came to him one day. Sometimes at go, an unusual move would just come to him, and over the years he'd come to trust this intuition more and more. So when the idea popped into his head that he should go and find the scary old man, he decided to do it.

Touya's mother Akiko was a fan of crime dramas. He had heard detailed descriptions of many such plots over the years, all the more so recently, as his mother was now widowed and seemed to have little else to occupy her time. So he had an idea of how a fictional detective might proceed, though he realized the most likely outcome for him, a non-fictional detective, was that he would fail to find the man, make an ass of himself, and perhaps end up substantially poorer into the bargain. He went ahead anyway.

His first task was to find something inconspicuous to wear. He wasn't sure exactly what would be inconspicuous in that neighborhood, so he settled on things he figured likely to blend into the background anywhere. Colors fairly subdued without being aggressively black, white or gray. Nothing too expensive or too new, but not noticeably old or shabby either.

The neighborhood which had seemed so threatening in the wintry dusk seemed less so on an early spring afternoon. The residents seemed a bit down at the heels, but more than willing to talk to him, especially when he ponied up 500 yen or so in response to their rather shy declarations of need. But he quickly realized that this wasn't getting him anywhere. He'd give a panhandler a small bill, and ask after the mysterious stranger. His interviewees either said they had no idea, said that they did, or implied that a further donation would stimulate their memories. Either way the result was the same. He paid and paid — in small bills, but it added up — and left for home poorer but not wiser, except insofar as he had learned that this approach probably wouldn't work.

He couldn't think of anything else to do, so he tried again on his next afternoon off, and the pattern repeated itself. He scattered bread upon the waters, but nothing came back. Was he spending too little? Too much? Targeting the wrong people? He was targeting derelicts, but that seemed to cover most of the neighborhood anyway.

On his third visit he decided he'd had enough. It had just turned April, and the sun was out and pleasantly warm. He sat down on a bench in a small square, and began to reconcile himself to the idea of giving up the hunt. It was hard to do precisely because he wasn't at all sure why he'd started hunting in the first place. Well, at least he hadn't wasted too much time or too much money on the project. Maybe it would be best to cut his losses and let the mystery remain unsolved.

A man sat down next to him. A well-built younger man, with a medium-length beard.

"You're that guy who's looking for somebody, but he doesn't know who it is, right?" The man seemed more mentally focused than anyone he'd interviewed so far, which was promising in a way.

"Yes. An older man with a bad-sounding voice."

"Is that all you know about him?"

"He did me a favor. Also, he recognized me."

"And you are…?"

"I'd prefer not to say. Not that I mind people knowing who I am. A lot of people do. But I was going to use it as a test. If I found somebody who pretended to be him, I'd know he was lying if he didn't know who I was."

"That's not much to go on."

"He also told me that he used to live in a building that they tore down to build the Pinnacle Hotel."

"So he's been around a while. That's three years at least, maybe four. I think I know the guy you mean. I'll put you in touch with him for 50,000 yen."

Touya bristled. "That's outrageous. I've paid all kinds of people all kinds of money and never seen anything in return. Why should I pay you anything at all, let alone such a sum as that?"

"Only pay me if I the guy I put you in touch with is the guy you want. I'll set something up. You meet him. If it's the wrong guy, no charge. But if it's the right guy, you pay up. To be honest, the guy I have in mind for you, might not be the right one. Nasty-sounding voice, sure, but half the bums on the street have that going for them. That cheap rotgut they drink, it might as well be battery acid. No, I think he's your man for the simple reason that you don't fit here. People like you just don't come here, unless they're looking for kinds of sex or kinds of drugs that they can't get in the nicer places. You don't fit into the picture. And neither does he. He's not like the rest of us. So, are you prepared to risk 50,000?"

"What do I need to do?"

"Here's my phone number. Call me in a week. I'll see him before that for sure. If he's willing to meet you, I'll set something up, OK?"

When he called the number he wasn't expecting anything other than more of the same frustration and wasted time he'd gotten from this ill-advised quest so far. But the man gave him an address to go to, and a day and time.

The time tuned out to be the following night. Going into that neighborhood when it was dark made Touya nervous, especially as he would be carrying an envelope full of cash. If the bearded man turned out to be a robber, he supposed he could just fork over the money, wallet, watch, whatever and get the hell out of there. Hide carfare in his shoe or something, so he could get home. He'd gone this far along and hadn't done a sensible thing yet, so why start now?

The address turned out to be a cheap bar he'd walked past a few times during his searching, without ever going inside before. He went inside and found that he hadn't missed much. He on a stool for a while and nursed a beer. He rarely drank, and the beer tasted odd. The bottle was probably contaminated with all kinds of microbes, inside and out. Worse still, he felt even more out of place here than he had on the street. The seedy patrons of this seedy establishment gave him looks that Touya interpreted as saying "go home, outsider." He was just about ready to give up, pack it in and leave, when he heard a raspy voice over his shoulder.

"Lost again, Touya?"

Touya didn't even have to turn around, he knew. Raspy voice and all, it was him. Shindou Hikaru.

* * *

**A/N:** There will be about four chapters (exactly four unless I decide to split Chapter 3 in half). Chapter 2 is already finished, and so is Chapter 4 (mostly). Chapter 3 is proving difficult, but I'm working on it.


	2. Chuban

Shindou was less shabby-looking than when Touya had last seen him. He'd cleaned himself up a bit, too. He'd had a shave and maybe a haircut as well. All the same, he didn't look good. No, not at all. He was, by Touya's reckoning, only forty-two, but looked ten years older than that, at the very least. He was rail thin, with blotchy skin and a generally weather-beaten appearance. He looked like someone who had just been rescued from several years cast away on a small island with too much sun and wind and not enough food.

"So what's up, Touya?" Shindou smiled in a distantly friendly way. His teeth didn't look good either.

"What's up? Shindou, we haven't seen each other in almost thirty years, and you ask 'what's up' as if we see each other every day." Touya wondered if finding Shindou had been a good idea after all. The man simply had no sense. "Do you have any idea how much money I spent tracking you down?"

"No, but I suppose if you want me to know you'll tell me. I asked Tsubaki-san for 1000 yen to come here and meet you, and he paid up without haggling, so you must have paid him a lot more than that. I should have asked for 5000."

"Tsubaki-san?"

"The guy with the beard who tracked me down for you. I don't know his real name. I call him Tsubaki because he looks like a guy I used to know named that. How much did you pay him?"

"50,000." Shindou burst out laughing, and Touya felt the blood rush to his face.

"No way can it be worth that much to find _me_, Touya," said Shindou, grinning and shaking his head. "Anyway, couldn't you have hired a detective? I bet he'd have found me in minutes. I'm not a fugitive living off the grid. I even subscribe to _Weekly Go_. They'd probably have been honored to give Touya Kisei a look at their mailing list."

"Well, I didn't know about that, did I." Touya thought about telling how he hadn't even realized that it was Shindou he was looking for, but decided it was just too complicated, not terribly interesting, and would likely make Shindou laugh at him again besides. The two of them just stood there for a moment, neither sure what to say next. Shindou spoke first.

"Let's get out of here, this place is a lousy dive."

"Why did you pick it as a meeting place then?"

"I picked a place I never go. That way, in case I changed my mind about meeting you, you wouldn't be able to find me by hanging around in here, or asking the regular customers about me. Nobody in this place knows me. A go player should be able to think a few moves ahead, huh? Anyway, let's go get something to eat. I'm buying. I know a good restaurant."

"Are you sure? I mean, meeting with you was my idea, so I really should…"

"Don't worry, I can afford it. My grandfather left me a little money in his will. It took a while before his lawyers found me, because I was sort of between jobs and didn't have a permanent address. But they kept at it and eventually they found me! Everybody says bad things about lawyers, but I'll take them over doctors any day. Thanks to them I've got a roof over my head and money left over at the end of the month. It wouldn't seem like much money to Touya Kisei, but I don't need much."

They left the bar and headed down the street in silence. For all the effort and expense he had gone to to find Shindou, Touya was at a loss as to what to talk to him about. Of course he was curious about Shindou's past. What on earth had happened? Going by Shindou's appearance, it must have been something terrible, followed by something even worse. But the man seemed cheerful. Maybe his life hadn't been all that bad. Shindou led the way to a Korean restaurant in the next block.

"The place doesn't look like much, but it's cheap and the food is really good!" The restaurant was down a few steps from street level. It was one long, narrow room with a counter running almost the entire length of one side and some tiny tables squeezed in on the other. The place was about half full. It didn't look especially inviting, but something smelled unfamiliar yet good, and Touya realized that he was hungry. A heavy-set man wearing an apron smiled wordlessly at them from behind the counter.

"I'll have soft tofu stew!" Shindou yelled out. "What do you want, Touya?"

"I don't really know Korean food, Shindou."

"I thought you went to Korea all the time. What about that trip where you played in that series against their top pros? I know you don't eat much while you're playing, but you were there for weeks! You had to eat some time!"

"Well, I don't usually travel around when I'm in Korea. I stay in a hotel near the match site. Restaurants near big hotels usually cater to foreigners, so I've eaten French, Italian or Japanese food in Korea a lot more often than I've eaten Korean food."

"OK, I'll order a bunch of different things, that way you'll be sure to like some of it at least." They ate their meal in silence, for the most part. Shindou hadn't exaggerated about ordering lots of things; the sheer number of dishes was daunting all by itself, though many arrived in quite small portions. Unsure whether he should treat them as dishes in their own right or as condiments, he decided just to _try_ them and see what he liked. Shindou explained what some of the things were, though he turned out not to be any great expert on Korean food; he just knew he liked it. For his own part, Touya also enjoyed the food, though a couple of the things he tried he decided must be an acquired taste.

"Thanks for not putting me through the third degree, Touya," Shindou said as they leaned back in their chairs after their meal, sipping tea. They had eaten quite a lot, but not made much of a dent in the huge spread Shindou had ordered. "I figured that at least part of why you tracked me down was to ask about stuff. But I wasn't going to let you buy me dinner and then disappoint you about answering questions. There's a lot that's happened since I quit go that you don't know, but that doesn't mean I'm going to tell you about it. So don't ask." For the first time in the evening, Shindou looked serious.

"I'll bet there's also a lot that happened _before_ you quit go that I don't know."

"That too." Shindou looked thoughtful. "And like I said, no questions. Maybe I'll tell you a thing or two, but most likely I won't. I didn't agree to meet with you because I needed 1000 yen. And I definitely didn't agree to it so I could answer a bunch of questions. I want you do a favor for me."

Discussion of this mysterious favor, whatever it was, apparently had to wait for Touya to accompany Shindou back to his room. They packed up two shopping bags full of leftovers. Touya was somewhat annoyed to find himself carrying both of them, but during the short walk from the restaurant to Shindou's room every step impressed upon him how physically weak his companion was. They proceeded at a very slow pace, but Shindou still stopped to rest frequently, particularly before or after going up or down even a gentle slope. Although he knew he should make allowances for an obviously sick man, Touya began to feel impatient.

They stopped not at an apartment house or hotel, as Touya expected, but at a small liquor store.

"Just wait here Touya," Shindou said. "I'll be out in a minute."

Touya's irritation was building. It seemed he had gone to all this time and trouble in order to help Shindou go shopping. For booze no less! Which made him realize: he hadn't paid off 'Tsubaki-san'. As if on cue, the bearded man materialized. He said nothing, but Touya knew what he wanted. Setting down the bags of Korean food, he took the envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it over. Without saying a word or bothering to count the money, his informant disappeared, just as Shindou emerged from the liquor store with a bottle inside a brown paper bag. 'There goes my 50,000 yen,' Touya thought bitterly, 'and here comes Shindou with what he spent his cut on.'

Shindou's room turned out to be in a tiny hotel above the liquor store, up a long narrow flight of steps. Shindou took a long rest before embarking on this challenge, and somewhat to Touya's surprise managed the entire flight without stopping. Touya was glad of that; the stairway reeked of urine. The lobby was cramped, with a thick lucite barrier separating them from the desk clerk. The clerk, a stern-looking Korean woman, slipped a key through a narrow slot to Shindou. After a brief exchange of words with Shindou that Touya didn't catch, the clerk hit a buzzer unlatching a door. She came out, took the leftovers from Touya and retreated behind the barrier.

"Kwon-san lets me keep stuff in her fridge. I'm her favorite tenant," Shindou smiled. The woman's demeanor made it seem unlikely. Perhaps Shindou was joking. The two of them walked down a harshly lit corridor and stopped at a numbered door. Shindou turned the key, pushed the door open, stepped inside and flipped a light switch. He gestured for Touya to follow. "Close the door behind you."

Touya did so. The bulb in the ceiling was feeble, and with the door to the hallway closed the room was very dark. Only gradually did Touya's eyes adjust. He was in the smallest bedroom he had ever seen. A narrow futon was pushed up against one wall. Against the other wall was a go board with stones on it: a game under way. So Shindou played go after all?

"I can't offer you a chair, because I don't have one. I hope you're OK with _seiza_. There's a cushion over there somewhere." Shindou gestured in the direction of the go board. Touya groped his way towards the go board, found a cushion, and knelt at the go board. He heard Shindou come over and take a seat on the futon, heard the top being twisted off the liquor bottle, Shindou taking a swig straight out of the bottle, putting the top back on and setting it on the floor. "When I win the lottery I'm going to buy this building and turn it into a monastery for go players. You come in here for anything from a day to a year and spend the whole time locked in a tiny cell just like this room. Futon, goban. Period. No fancy amenities to distract anyone. Maybe we'd slide kifu under the door now and then for entertainment. Nice, huh?"

Touya wasn't sure how to respond. He gestured at the goban. "You've been playing?"

"I said no questions." Shindou sounded uneasy. "But I guess I really meant no questions about the past. That's a game from _Weekly Go _I was replaying. I've taken up studying go again, but I still don't play. That game there is from a while back, actually, I just never bothered to clear it up. These days, I replay the games in my head. It's easier for me. My fingers don't work right sometimes, and it's hard to place a stone without messing up nearby ones. In my head, the stones get put in exactly the right spot every time. At least my brain doesn't have the shakes, huh. Listen, Touya, I still want that favor but I'm kinda tired. It'll take you a couple hours, tops. Make up your mind and come back any time, if you can do it for me. You don't have to call ahead or anything, I'm almost always here. When I do go out it's never for long. Now that Kwon-san knows you she'll let you in here if you want to wait for me. I think she's on duty at the desk about 20 hours out of the day, and the other four the streets probably aren't safe anyway. OK?"

"_Fine_." Touya was furious. It seemed as if he had been invited into this flophouse merely to carry Shindou's leftover food. He'd paid thousands of yen to be treated like _this_, and to be asked for still more unspecified favors on top of that? Who did Shindou think he was talking to? He was _Kisei! Honinbou_! What was Shindou? _Nothing_! He would have kicked Shindou if there had been enough light to see him.

"That's good then, Touya. I need to lie down for a while. Just make sure, when you go out, that the door locks behind you. It'll save me getting up."

As Touya groped his way to the door he heard the bottle being twisted open again. Blinking in the glare of the hallway, he closed the door behind him. The latch clicked solidly shut, locking Shindou in his dark cell of a room.

'He can rot in there for all I care,' Touya thought to himself as he ran down the reeking staircase.

**A/N:** My thanks to those who reviewed chapter 1. So far as the rest of the story is concerned, the good news is that I've figured out how to end it, which means I can actually write chapter 3 now. The bad news is that I won't have any free time to actually do this very soon. So it will be a couple of weeks, maybe more.

A word about chapter titles: _ Fuseki _means the opening, or beginning of the game. Chuban means the middle of the game. The third chapter will predictably be titled _Yose _(endgame). The fourth and last chapter I still need a title for. I'd prefer to name it after the rearranging of stones after the game (you know, where Mitani-kun cheats). But I don't know the word for that. If I can't find it, I suppose I'll just call it _Owari_, which means the end of the game.


	3. Yose

**My thanks once again to all reviewers. **

* * *

Two weeks later, Touya was still smoldering with anger over his encounter with Shindou. He was angry at Shindou for being as infuriatingly opaque as ever, and on top of that asking Touya to return to do some mysterious favor. He was even angrier at himself. Nobody had held a gun to his head; he'd allowed himself to be reeled in.

What was wrong with him? Was he going to allow Shindou to do just what he'd done years ago? To appear as if out of nowhere, as mysterious, fascinating and infuriating as ever? If he allowed himself to be drawn in, why should he expect anything different to happen this time? No doubt Shindou would disappear all over again, leaving Touya frustrated as before. And if some day Touya was the holder of every go title in the world, no doubt Shindou would reappear and instantly make him feel like an overmatched twelve year old again.

One thing he had to admit to himself was that he had never been able to keep calm where Shindou was concerned. From their first encounter years ago Shindou had always had a destabilizing effect on him. In some ways it had been good: knocking him out of the rut he'd been in – first to struggle to improve his game sufficiently to face the terrifying strength Shindou had showed when he'd first played him, and then to keep on improving in order to stay ahead of the weak Shindou who'd disappointed him so badly afterward. He'd kept that momentum going and made a strong showing in his first couple of years as a pro while Shindou, proving himself neither as strong nor as weak as Touya had seen first hand, became an insei and then a 1-dan.

But then Shindou suddenly, maddeningly, inexplicably just stopped playing. It was unthinkable, but he did it. Just remembering that time was enough to make Touya's blood pressure spike. At the time, he had been utterly enraged. His fury had lasted for months, to the point that it affected his go. He played so aggressively that inferior players were pounded to a pulp in short order. Strong players, however, made him pay for his rashness. He fell out of the leagues, and didn't move up in ranking for two years. Only gradually was he able to calm down, play a balanced game of go, and begin to be the player he'd shown he could be in his first year as a pro. Shindou had a lot to answer for.

Touya spent a couple of weeks stewing over their visit and Shindou's request of a "favor", whatever that might turn out to be. He kept telling himself that there was nothing to be gained by going back, unless Shindou gained a few thousand yen or another bottle of cheap hooch by it. There were many things that Touya needed to do, and going back to that filthy flophouse was not one of them.

But he went back, as he had always known he would.

* * *

This time the desk clerk, recognizing him, handed him a key and a note which read: "Knock and wait for me to say come in. If it takes any time I'm probably out come in anyway and wait for me I'm never gone long."

He knocked. A part of him hoped that Shindou would be out, that he could go home (as if he would _dream_ of waiting in this place!), persuade himself that he had done enough, and never return.

"Who is it?" came the raspy voice from the tiny room.

"Touya." Touya wondered if Shindou got very many visitors. He had trouble imagining who would want to visit Shindou in this awful place, even though he himself was visiting. After a long pause he heard Shindou invite him in. Touya opened the door. It was pitch dark inside.

"Flip the light switch. It's on your right, about – yeah, that's it."

This time, the light was bright enough that Touya could see the interior of Shindou's room clearly. Shindou was lying on the futon, wearing pajamas and sunglasses. An empty bottle of cheap liquor lay on its side on the floor next to him; next to it an unopened bottle stood upright.

"A lot brighter now, isn't it? New bulb." Shindou smiled at him and tapped his sunglasses with a fingernail. "So bright I need these, to protect my crappy eyes. But I figured I shouldn't let you fumble around in the dark like before. Could you give me a hand up?" Shindou, with apparent difficulty, raised himself up into a sitting position. "Maybe you'd better make that two hands."

"You – you can't stand up by yourself, Shindou?" Touya was worried; Shindou hadn't seemed at all well the last time he'd seen him, but this was alarming. Was he simply drunk, or was it something worse?

"I can, but I have to go really really slow, or my blood rushes from my head to my feet and I get dizzy. So pull me on up, and if I start to wobble a bit just grab on to me for a second so I don't fall."

Touya reached down and, somewhat awkwardly, took Shindou's hands and helped pull him up. Even seeing how thin Shindou was, it was startling to realize how little the man weighed. It was like lifting up an empty suit of clothes. Touya himself was thin, but to weigh so little Shindou must be almost non-existent.

As he came to a fully standing position, Shindou sagged and started to topple forward. Touya reflexively hugged Shindou to prevent him from falling. Shindou's head lolled on Touya's shoulder. They stood there for a moment. Touya wondered: had Shindou passed out? He could hear Shindou's ragged breathing in his ear, and feel Shindou's bony chest pressed against his. Shindou's hair brushed Touya's cheek. It was soft and smelled of shampoo.

Touya had always been a shy person. Interacting with other people made him feel anxious and unconfident. He never knew what to say. He coped by being extra polite. A little too formal, sometimes. It kept people at a distance, which in the short run was easier on his nerves, but had the effect of keeping him isolated from other people in the long run. But with Shindou for some reason he didn't feel that anxiety. It was as if he instinctively felt as if Shindou was a part of himself. A part with which he had sometimes been at war, but which all the same could never be truly alien to him.

"Okay. I'm okay." Shindou seemed to be saying it to himself as much as to Touya. It showed he was at least partly conscious, anyway. "Touya…you're nice and warm. Come back next winter so I can use you as a blanket."

"Shindou!" Touya couldn't help laughing. The situation was strange, funny and sad all at once. Shindou put his hands on Touya's shoulders and pushed himself slowly away from Touya and completely upright.

"OK, I'm off. Just down the hall. In case you didn't notice, the presidential suite doesn't have its own toilet." Touya was somewhat unnerved; Shindou seemed barely able to stand, much less walk. But he gave Shindou the benefit of the doubt that he knew his own capacity, and watched him shuffle slowly out of the room and down the corridor.

Touya stood in the drab hallway, waiting for Shindou to return. As he did so, full recognition of the dreary, shabby, awfulness of the place closed over him like the waters of a vile swamp. Of course places like this existed, or at least it didn't surprise him to find that they did. But he'd never _seen_ one before, and to think that someone he knew _lived_ here was horrible to contemplate. One of the other residents passed him in the hall as he waited. The man's eyes looked hopeless and dead. Did Shindou's eyes look like that, Touya wondered, under those sunglasses?

After taking just long enough that Touya had started to worry, Shindou returned. Even the slow shuffle to the toilet had taken a lot out of him. He was short of breath.

"Shindou, why are you staying in a place like this? I can–I mean, shouldn't you be in a hospital?"

"If seeing doctors made people well I'd be the healthiest man in Japan," Shindou wheezed. "I went the whole doctors and hospitals route. They turned me into a pincushion with their needles, probes, and even worse things. I walked out of that place about as healthy as when I went in. They called it 'stabilized'. Fuck. I've had it with those sons of bitches. I haven't seen a doctor since January, and I don't feel any worse than I did back then. Well, not _much_."

"But Shindou, you really sound–"

"I know, I know, I sound terrible today and I bet I don't look all that good either." Shindou sounded a bit testy. "I have good days and bad days and this happens to be a bad day, that's all. You came to do me a favor, right? When we're done with that, if you're still worried I'll go to some hospital and let them inject me or vivisect me or whatever. Ok? Scout's honor."

"Well…" Touya wasn't sure Shindou should put off getting, well, at least looked at. What favor could be worth postponing care when he was clearly so sick? "What's the favor, anyway?"

"Play a game with me." Shindou knew that he had asked the one thing that Touya would not refuse. "Come on then." He shuffled back to his room, not bothering to look behind to make sure that Touya was following.

* * *

Touya was still worried about Shindou, but they made it back to the room without incident. Shindou even managed to lie down on his own, though Touya supposed the trip down to the futon had to be easier than the trip up had been.

"Touya, I can tell you don't like this place. But for me, it's fine. You only see what's bad about it. When I look at it, I see someplace that's warm, dry and safe. I can curl up here," Shindou said, thumping the futon for emphasis, "have a drink or two, and life ain't so bad." His hands found the unopened liquor bottle.

"Aren't we going to play?"

"Oh, yeah. Right." Shindou sounded a bit reluctant, but he put the bottle down. "Get out the stones and nigiri. I call odd."

"How can you play lying down? You can't see the board."

"Lately my eyes haven't been working so good, but even before that I didn't always have a go board or stones handy all the time. In the hospital the only way I could play was in my head. I'm more used to that now than I am to touching the stones."

"But–"

"I know, I know. You're Touya Kisei. I don't expect to win, but I'll keep it interesting for you."

"If you're going to play blind then I should too. I _am_ Touya Kisei. And Honinbou. And–"

"Well, all right, _Honinbou_. But if you lose track of the stones, switch to using the board. I don't want to win just because you put a big handicap on yourself."

Touya, a bit irritated at Shindou's arrogance, reached into the goke and put a handful of stones onto the board. There turned out to be eleven of them, so Shindou was black.

"4-2"

"4-2? Shindou–" Shindou was either crazy, or trying to play some sort of a mind game. Touya bit his tongue, announced his response and the game continued. Shindou's crazy opening move hadn't been some kind of accident. None of his moves made any kind of sense. Touya struggled to hold a picture of the board in his head. Suddenly it all came back to him: he was standing in a dusty storage room at Kaio, holding an old book of kifu and trying to play blind go against a seventh grader– a player so weak he didn't really belong in the go club, but whose haphazard moves were so hard for Touya to follow blind that he would have lost if the game hadn't been interrupted.

"I–I've lost track of your stones in the lower left," Touya eventually had to admit.

"Time to switch to using the board then, huh?" Shindou then easily proceeded to call out the moves of the game up to that point. Rubbing it in, Touya thought as he placed the stones. So he can remember randomly placed stones better than I can. So what?

"Shouldn't we just start over? You've proved your point; now let's play a serious game. Look at these stones! It's a joke!"

"We'll finish _this_ game! I worked hard on my shapes and I want to keep them like that."

"You can't defend a position like this! If I had been seeing the board properly I could have killed half of your stones already. Now that I can see them, they're sitting ducks."

"So kill them. Listen Touya, I never expected to beat the best go player in Japan, not in my first game in two plus decades. But I can still play, and I can defend this position. Against almost anybody. Against you, if you don't take it seriously. I could beat – who's your strongest student?"

"I don't have any students, Shindou."

"No students? Touya, you've been teaching shidou go since you were in elementary school." Shindou seemed more alarmed by this than by his own very poor health. "You have to have students! Go get some!"

"But Shindou, I'm always so busy. I'm always preparing for matches, and –"

"You'll learn things from your students too, Touya. It won't be a waste of time." Shindou sighed. "Well, anyway, let's finish this. I don't expect to win, but do play seriously."

Touya finally killed Shindou's stones in the upper left.

"So what do you think?" Shindou was clearly enjoying the game.

"I admit it isn't as easy as I thought it would be. I've never played such strange positions, except I suppose against total beginners. But it's easy to refute _their_ ideas. Against you, though...I'm going to win, but it's going slower than I thought it would. "

"What do you think of the lower left?"

"Your stones are floating. I don't see how you can save them."

"Me neither. But I'll make you work for them. What about the right?"

Touya had avoided the right. If the left was a briar patch, the right was…

"I've been staying out of it. I have no idea where to play. Knowing you, it's a carefully laid mine field."

Shindou laughed. They continued to play. Touya tackled the lower left. Shindou put up a fight as he'd promised, but Touya could sense the impatience in his voice as he called out his moves. Shindou sounded tired, too, and his breathing was labored.

Eventually, Touya killed Shindou's stones in the lower left. He couldn't really see why Shindou hadn't resigned already; the game wasn't even close. Even if Shindou somehow managed to win the entire right side, Touya would still win by a couple of moku. Oh well, he supposed that Shindou wanted to see Touya put his foot in the 'mine field'. But Touya engineered it so that Shindou would have to place a stone in it first. Maybe that would give Touya a clue as to where he should play.

"14-8." Touya could hear the satisfaction in Shindou's wheezing voice.

14-8 was–a revelation. Touya had completely misunderstood the situation. In retrospect it made sense. Shindou had encouraged Touya's reluctance to play on the right side because it had been a house of cards. It hadn't been a mine field at all. If Touya had played at 14-8 on any of the last 30 hands, he would have beaten Shindou by 40 moku. More. Shindou would have been annihilated. Now it was too late. Shindou's stones would live, and Touya's would die.

Touya realized that now the outcome of the game was unclear. They were at the beginning of yose, and if Shindou had the advantage, there wasn't much Touya could do to come back. He frantically calculated territories, possibilities, then recalculated. The path to the end of the game was clear; Touya stood to finish the game two stones behind. Considering komi, he would win the game, but such an ending…

Touya wasn't sure how long he had spent just sitting there, contemplating Shindou's move. But he was suddenly aware that he wasn't hearing Shindou's raspy breathing, and hadn't been hearing it for some time.

* * *

The next couple of hours passed in a blur. Without really believing that it was all really happening, Touya went and broke the news to Kwon-san, who seemed to take the death of her "favorite tenant" very much in stride. Perhaps similar events were a frequent occurrence at the hotel. Her main concern seemed to be, as dead men don't pay rent, to get Shindou's room cleaned out.

The men who carried Shindou out kept a non-stop conversation going about baseball which they interrupted only to ask Touya to sign some paperwork. He signed the papers without even glancing at them. Everything seemed to happen with cold, quick efficiency. The one difficulty was finding a taxi to take Touya home. He would have taken the train, but he had resolved to take Shindou's go board with him– if he left it behind it might become Kwon-san's coffee table. The board would be too cumbersome to carry on the train, especially with the stones as well. Several taxi services were called, but had no taxis to spare – or at any rate did not once they heard what neighborhood they'd have to go into. Eventually a less particular taxi service was found, and Touya went to collect Shindou's go board. Kwon-san provided a shopping bag to hold the stones, and some other of Shindou's possessions. As an afterthought, not sure why he did it, Touya put the full bottle of liquor into the bag along with the stones.

The taxi came. The driver, an older man with a goatee, turned out by some odd coincidence to be a passionate go fan who recognized Touya at once. The man spent the entire trip talking a blue streak about the recent Judan series. Touya followed scarcely a word of it. He idly wondered if his driver had ever heard of Shindou, or could remember him if he ever had. Probably not, it had been so long. Touya didn't ask – it would mean explaining, and he just didn't have the strength.

He made it home. The driver tried to refuse any payment, but Touya insisted. They ended up with a compromise of sorts: in lieu of a tip, Touya took a copy of _Weekly Go_ from the shopping bag of Shindou's things, autographed it and gave it to the man.

He walked into his empty apartment, somewhat clumsily carrying the heavy awkward go board and shopping bag. He set the board down, but in the process managed to tip the shopping bag over. The liquor bottle rolled out, coming to rest against the wall on the other side of the entry way.

At last, Touya cried.

* * *

**A/N:** It's all over except for a follow-up visit with Touya, nothing especially dramatic. No, Shindou will not come back as a ghost and haunt Touya. That story's already been written (and very well indeed) so no need for me to go there. This was a difficult episode for me to write. Shindou is so full of life that it seems out of character fro him to die in such a way.

I hope the go makes at least some sense; I don't play at all. 4-2 is very rarely used as an opening move, according to a quick internet search. Apart from that there's no significance to it, not that I intended anyway.


	4. Seichi

It was barely four o'clock and already the sky was starting to grow light. Touya lay in bed wondering whether to try to fall asleep again, or just give up and get up. He'd surprised himself by not having any trouble falling asleep the night before, but he'd woken after only three or four hours and hadn't slept again.

He was surprised that he didn't feel more angry at Shindou. Of course Shindou hadn't died on purpose, but it was just the inconsiderate sort of thing that he'd do, on purpose or not. Maybe the fact that this time Touya knew what had happened helped. Well, a little bit. Being older helped too. All the same, it bothered him. All the questions he'd wanted to ask. The answers he'd never get.

Last night he'd thought about drinking Shindou's bottle of booze. As a final gesture of affection, perhaps. Or maybe just because he felt like getting truly hammered. But he hadn't, and the bottle was now safely out of sight at the back of one of the kitchen cabinets. He'd probably come across it the next time he moved, laugh and throw it in the trash. Maybe.

The go board was a different story. There would be something wrong about throwing away a go board, even a cheap, much-used one like Shindou's. But he didn't want to keep looking at it sitting there in the corner of his living room. Maybe the Go Association had a "donate-a-board" program. Surely some go club would be happy to get it.

Eventually he gave up on the possibility of sleep. He got up, showered and dressed. He didn't have any matches today, but he didn't want to stay inside. He thought of one thing he ought to take care of.

* * *

Touya was glad to see Amano-san at his desk. The man was getting on in years, and had been going to retire 'any time now' for close to a decade. Touya paused at the door, having dodged several young reporters whose hopes for a big interview were, he noted with relief, outweighed by their trepidation at approaching a title holder unbidden.

"Kisei!" Amano rose from behind the desk. "What can I do for you? It's an honor."

Touya couldn't help smiling. "You might just as well call me Touya-kun, Amano-san. You've known me since I was old enough to walk. As it happens there is something you can do for me. I have something I'd like printed in Weekly Go. You print notices of this sort from time to time, as I recall. I don't know if this is worded as you would prefer, so make changes as you see fit," Touya said, handing him a sheet of paper.

Amano read:

_Shindou Hikaru, former go professional, died on the 5th of May in Tokyo at age 42 after a long illness. He will be remembered by older go fans as one of the most talented young players of his generation. At age 13, less than two years after beginning his study of go, he passed the pro exam, despite taking it the same year as Isumi Shinichirou and Honda Toshinori, both of whom passed the following year. Apart from a loss to Touya Kouyou in the 1-dan series, he never lost an official match as a pro. However, soon after the start of his pro career he abruptly vanished from the go world and never returned. His reasons for abandoning go remain unknown. He leaves no survivors._

"I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that he never lost a match as a pro." Touya said. "After all, when he stopped going to matches he was ruled to have lost all of those matches by default. But during his brief time as a pro, he never lost a match he actually appeared for. Do you remember Shindou, Amano-san?"

"Of course I do. I'm getting old, Touya-kun, and I couldn't possibly tell you what I had for dinner last night. But I'll never forget that match with your father, where Shindou took twenty minutes to make his first move. I was right there in the room with them, you know. I've never seen anything like it, before or since. I wouldn't forget anything like that. Had you kept in touch with Shindou-kun over the years?"

"Not at all. I hadn't seen him since soon after he quit go. I happened upon him by chance this winter. I didn't recognize him, but he recognized me. Eventually, we- renewed our acquaintance. He no longer played go, but he had continued to study it. Amano-san, let me tell you something off the record."

"Certainly. May I ask, why off the record?"

"Because it's really speculation on my part, and some things Shindou told me that -he might have lied to me about. But so far as I know, when I recently met him, he hadn't played a game of go in almost thirty years. Not a single game. He had been completely out of touch with the go world for almost all that time. Only in the last couple of years he started subscribing to Weekly Go. He would play over the games you printed and analyze them. Just before he died, I visited him and we played a game. Amano-san, I've been studying go full time my entire life. I started studying go ten years before Shindou did, and kept studying for another twenty-five years after he abandoned the game."

"And? You did beat him, didn't you?"

"I was barely winning when the game was-broken off. Amano-san, no other go player I know of could have beaten him. I know that sounds egotistical, but I've- I've always been interested in Shindou's go. And-"

"Yes?"

"He was playing blind go. His eyes were bothering him, so he played lying down with his eyes closed. He had me call out my moves, and he called his out. I placed the stones for both of us. I knew he had been a pro of course, but even so I was astonished that he could play at such a high level, blind and not having played a game in years. I can't imagine how strong he might have gotten if he had remained a pro and kept studying the game all these years."

"It's a terrible shame that he stopped playing, then."

"Yes. Yes, it is."

"Well then, Touya-kun. I'll see something gets into the next Weekly Go. The advantage of being a weekly is that we can take a day or two to call around and get people's comments or memories of Shindou. We'll do anything from a brief notice like this," Amano-san said, waving the paper Touya had given him, "to as much as half a page. Depending on the response we get."

* * *

Out in the hall, Touya breathed a sigh of relief. He'd been worried that he might get emotional- start crying, or even shouting with anger. Where Shindou was concerned, he still couldn't always predict how he'd react. What would Amano-san have thought?

He got off the elevator and instantly came face to face with Shirakawa-san.

"Kisei!" the older man smiled at him. "It's unusual to see you here on a Saturday!"

"I had some business upstairs, Shirakawa-san." Touya had hoped to avoid running into anyone, but now that he thought about it, this was probably a good thing. "Umm, Shirakawa-san?"

"Yes, Kisei?"

"I'm afraid I have some bad news. I really should tell you, as you're a student of Morishita-san."

"Bad news?" Shirakawa looked puzzled.

"Yes. Shindou Hikaru, one of your teacher's former students, has passed away. Did you know him?"

"Oh, yes. He even came to my go class. That was only a year or so before he became an insei and started coming to sensei's study sessions with Waya-kun. It really doesn't seem so long ago. He didn't know a thing about go. I remember showing him the 'ladder'. And he grew so strong so fast." Shirakawa-san seemed lost in thought. This might be a good time to slip out of here, Touya thought.

"Well, I'd better be going, Shirakawa-san." Touya got half way to the door but then stopped and turned. "Shirakawa-san?"

"Yes, Kisei?"

"I'm thinking of taking a student. Perhaps one of the more promising insei does not have a teacher?"

* * *

**A/N:** Well, that's the end. I never expected this story to grow so long. If I were a better writer I could have written just the deathbed scene (my original intention), and say all the things I wanted to say just with that. But it is what it is.

My thanks to all reviewers, especially those who reviewed later chapters. I needed of encouragement to get me through the later stages. My special thanks to Risha11, who provided the title for the last chapter in response to my query.

Finally, I'm going to close with a very brief epilog. It's rather silly and doesn't match the tone of the rest of _Closure_, so I don't really consider it part of the story. But it amused me to write it, so I thought perhaps someone would like to read it. (The idea of doing an epilog at all was inspired at least in part by the "bonus" material at the end of volume 6, which I read just the other day. As an aside, I would recommend anyone who knows only the anime to go and read the manga. Much of it is more or less identical, but some things are different.)

* * *

**Epilog:**

Touya sat at the go board, waiting for his student. He checked his watch and frowned. Almost ten minutes late. So far Mori-san had been such a good pupil. In addition to being as promising a go player as Shirakawa-san had said, she was polite, never late, and best of all didn't remind him of Shindou at all. And she'd gratefully accepted the used go board he'd offered her.

He heard footsteps of someone running down the hall towards him. His student entered, flushed and out of breath.

"I'm sorry I'm late, sensei. It's just that I got into an argument on the bus with this complete _jerk_ and I forgot my stop. I got off at the next one but I had to run all the way back here. And it's all his fault! Yes it _is_, too! Seriously, sensei, did you ever have somebody who _totally_ drove you _nuts_? All the _time_, even at night when _normal_ people have to _sleep_?"

"Excuse me, Mori-san, but we're already late beginning our lesson." Touya answered, somewhat bewildered by his student's outburst.

"Sorry, sensei. But all the same, what kind of jerk keeps opening with crazy moves like _this_?"

Instead of placing her four handicap stones, Mori reached into the goke, pulled out a single stone and slammed it onto the board with a loud thwack.

"Seriously, _4-2_? What kind of an opening move is that, sensei? Sensei, are you all right? Sensei?"


End file.
